All very central to my interests, the ideal context for developing embodied approaches to live coding, perhaps. I’m really looking forward to getting started, although it won’t be for another four months or so..

I’ve got some sounds out of my new live coding system, codenamed “smoothdirt”. Here’s an mp3 for you. The sounds are triggered with some C and structured and scheduled with some Haskell. Plenty more to do, but already really happy hearing embedded juxtoposition of timescales, smooth multichannel panning (2 channels in this test, but I’m playing on a quadrophonic cinema soundsystem at lovebytes) and sample accuracy, which I test at the end by playing a kick drum sample a lot.

My new representation also allows me to treat musical structure as both a discrete pattern and a continuous signal, which I’m very happy about, but haven’t explored the depths of yet..

Anyway with a few tweaks and effects it’ll be ready for the algorave in London this weekend.

A while back I came up with this way of representing musical patterns as pure functions in Haskell:

data Pattern a = Pattern {at :: Int -> [a], period :: Int}

These patterns can be composed nicely with pattern combinators, creating strange polyrhythmic structures, see my earlier post for info.

This turned out just great for representing acid techno, see for example this video of people dancing to Dave and I. I was using Tidal which uses a representation similar to the above (and Dave was using his lovely SchemeBricks software).

However lately I’ve been wanting to make music other than acid techno, in particular in preparation for a performance with Hester Reeve, a Live Artist.